Neo Hansaetic Energy Politics
In 2027 a new political party is formed in Finland. The country has not been recovering very successfully from the economic recessions and especially the country side has been going through massive unemployment. Everyone remembers the former glory from Nokia days and how it all started: bunch of engineers at university garage were playing around with radio-waves having multiplexing competitions for no reason. Then information communications starts growing exponentially and retrofitting the cable infrastructure at the countryside becomes a real nation wide problem. Then Nokia is founded to first build cell-networks and then making profits with mobile phones. Some politically motivated group of people thought that Finland needed a new set of engineers, a garage and a new competition for fun. The green problem of the time was about getting rid off fossil fuels. Finland had a special circumstances, which Elon Musk could not solve; how to heat the apartments during winter time. Solar powered heating just made no sense at all and would had required rebuilding the entire electric infrastructure, which had been sold to a foreign company a decade earlier. However, that was part of the plan of Niklas Rutherford; because now the option of upgrading the electric grid for more renewable friendly option was out of the political table, without turning towards more socialistic politics, which at EU era was impossible. Now the game was set for him to push his own agenda. Finland could never become free of fossile fuels without Gen V+ nuclear power, because Finns need to heat their houses, also at the country side. Gen V+ nuclear power plants use Thorium and has 30 times better EROI than best fossile sources; they are not dangerous, they produce no waste (they can recycle the waste of older generators) and Thorium is so abundant, that all energy requirements of the world could be covered for 1000 years. If such reactors could be miniaturized for single household sizes. That was the vision of Niklas. Little did he know, that in hundred years, his vision would produce Gen VIII generators, which are of the size of a water bottle, the death blow of the electric grid. So, in 2025 Niklas had founded this political party, which was to change Finland forever. The party was called Nuclear Green Telosist Party (telosism is new metamodern form of capitalism, where each individual is guaranteed a right for private property and a personal growth plan; will be subject of another article). The grand visions, was to become a great nuclear power country. The first political program goals were to get District Heating systems of all major cities from fossil fueled to nuclear powered systems and start a nuclear partnership program with China. The safe railroad connection from China allowed the importation of the building blocks of Gen V+ generator components, which were to be assembled in Finland. This partnership later lead to closer political cooperativism with Finland and China. China had been investing in Finnish game industry for a decade and also had close co-operation in many other high-tech industries. Finns didn't have much of domestic capital - richest Finns were ten times more poor than richest swedes - but Chinese investors had been more than lavish in their Finnish ventures. Of course, China had a political agenda of getting a hold in Scandinavic parts of Europe. In 2027 the NGTP (Nuclear Green Telosist Party) had a great success in elections; they managed to capture 8% of votes, from the Green League, the Left Alliance, National Coalition Party and the Center Party of Finland. However, they remained in opposition for their first legislature. During those first four years, things started moving fast. Niklas facilitated foundation of two experimental nuclear energy startups, whose founding members were big names within the Finnish energy industry; the old fossil companies were first major investors with some Chinese partners. They started creating plans for green nuclear Finland. In 2030 they pushed their agenda in media by releasing plans, calculations and forecasts, which were promising impressive future for Finland. They also hired some top researchers. Their agenda was to show to the general public, that they were very serious about replacing the District Heating of Finland with nuclear power and at the same time provided a prospect for Finland to become significant player in the high-tech energy industry in entire Europe. However, it was obvious that the opposition in media has started making claims, that NGTP would be politically corrupt and they wanted to get rich by abusing Finnish political system. This was the exact thing Niklas had planned for. Just before election campaigns started, Niklas did something remarkable; he had made a deal with the Finnish Pension Insurance Funds, which had become major owners of the two nuclear ventures and with some of the Finnish State Funds. This practically meant, that if Niklas and his associates would get rich, so would the Finnish government with more than 30% stake on the two companies. This created a political check mate: the right wing didn't dare to attack him, because his way of organizing his agenda through private sector was legitimate within their political agendas and they didn't want to be the ones who would turn their backs on Chinese investors. The left wing were already quite China positive and large public sector ownership was meaningful for them, not perhaps to the Left Alliance, but the bigger leftist party, the Social Democratic Party of Finland, which had merely been about pensions for past three decades. The Green League of course had their disdains with nuclear energy, but the fight against fossil energy had started to look like a lost case without nuclear power within the past two decades. The NGTP got 24% of the votes and formed the 78th incumbent government of Finland with Social Democratic Party of Finland and National Coalition Party. During that legislature Finland got practically free loan from China providing the government with extra money of 3 billion euros a year to be used for the nuclear generator program. It included foundation of new university departments, foundation of new technology funding institution (through which the two companies were mostly funded) and an investment for building the first experimental Gen V+ reactor near the city of Turku. ... to be continued ... How the major cities got nuclearized; how the country side was nuclearized; how China affected the politics; how Finland became major partner for developing countries with China; how China annexed the railways of Russia and how Russia broke up; how the legacy of Nilas kept on growing a life on it's own, the Gen VIII water bottle sized reactors and abolishing of electric grids.